Delivering Exceptional Multi-Channel Content Experiences

Creating consistent multichannel experiences is a requirement, not an option. Today, 90% of customers expect a consistent experience regardless of where or how they interact with your content. Unfortunately, many organizations are unable to deliver. But, it doesn't have to be this way. With a little planning and the right tools and techniques, we can optimize our content production processes for multichannel delivery. We can deliver the right content to the right prospects and customers, at the right time, on the device of the their choosing. And, we can significantly reduce costs — and drive sales -- in the process.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a discussion with Joe Gelb and Gal Oron of Zoomin Software about the often-overlooked topic of content delivery. You'll learn how some forward-thinking companies leverage intelligent product content to deliver a consistent and seamless user experience. You'll find out how leveraging product content can help increase sales and engender customer loyalty. And, you'll discover how you can provide prospects and customers with immediate access to the answers they need, when and where they need it.

Everybody’s talking about bots, but even if you don’t have one yet, how do you get your content ready for a future full of bots? And what about the next thing after that, and after that? The key is writing and structuring content in a clean, simple, granular way.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and former journalist—and Microsoft Office content strategist—Doug Kim, for a free, one-hour webinar designed to help you understand the need for structured content in our fast-changing technology-powered world. Doug will discuss why structured content is needed for much more than multi-channel publishing Attend this session to learn how to lay the foundation for future by restructuring your content, why it’s critical to match single intents to single answers, and why we need to reuse content in bots, instant answers, and other advanced content forms.

Doug Kim spent his formative years in journalism, where he eventually became Arts and Entertainment editor of The Seattle Times. He’s been at Microsoft for eight years, where, amongst other things, he’s led efforts to revamp the voice and tone of content and UI text in the Microsoft Office suite and improve video and multimedia content. More recently, he drove the content strategy for the Bing-based content form known as Instant Answers for Windows 10. While continuing to nurture Instant Answers, he leads a team focused on accessibility, Inclusive Design and Microsoft’s experimental new Virtual Support Agent. So yes, he went from editing Britney Spears reviews and restaurant coverage to technical content, but in his mind it all makes sense.

The good news is that with some engineering, chatbots can employ and extend existing content repositories. Intelligent content allows us to single-source content out to interactive channels such as chatbots and intelligent assistants. The side-effects may include boosting the ROI of existing content, increasing sales cycles, improving conversions, and reducing customer service costs while improving satisfaction.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, with intelligent content expert, Cruce Saunders, founder and principal at [A] (simplea.com) and author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World, as he discusses chatbots as a new content distribution channel that we can’t afford to ignore. Cruce will cover basic chatbot content requirements, components and construction. And, he’ll discuss how to future-proof content with a content model, making it chatbot-ready.

Attendees will learn:
* Practical steps to integrating chatbot content elements into your existing content types
* The various types of chatbots available today and the value they serve as an engagement tool and content channel
* How to leverage existing content to power one or more chatbots, and practical ways to integrate chatbot components into your CMS structured content types
* The high-level first steps to building a chatbot-enabled content model

Advances in narrow artificial intelligence make possible agentive systems that do things directly for their users (like, say, an automatic pet feeder). They deliver on the promise of user-centered design, but present fresh challenges in understanding their unique promises and pitfalls. In particular, these systems challenge content strategists and technical, marketing, and support writers, and product managers alike to think in new ways since they deliver value mostly when the user isn’t paying them any attention.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Christopher Noessel, Global Design Practice Manager for Travel and Transportation at IBM for a free, one-hour discussion about agentive technology. Christopher will introduce us to the concepts from his new book, "Designing Agentive Technology" (Rosenfeld Media, 2017). bit.ly/agentivebook

Attendees will learn what agentive technology is (and what it isn't), its history, how it fits in the artificial intelligence mix, and why agentive systems are so interesting and potentially useful. Come prepared to ask questions.

About the presenter

Christopher Noessel is the Global Design Practice Manager for Travel and Transportation industries with IBM. He teaches, speaks about, and evangelizes design internationally. His spidey-sense goes off semi-randomly, leading him to speak about things from interactive narrative to ethnographic user research, interaction design to generative randomness, and designing for the future. He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017).

Just a few years ago, providing context-sensitive software product documentation was a goal for many technical communication teams. The aim was to provide contextually relevant—and helpful—content based on a customer's location in a software product. By breaking large technical documents into smaller pieces, these forward-thinking companies were able to make discrete chunks of content available in the product interface; no need for customers to go looking for assistance in a user manual or online help portal.

Today, contextually relevant content is expected by digitally-savvy consumers. The definition of context has broadened to include many additional factors (user profile data, geographic location, product model, version number, preferred language, time zone, previous interaction history, and the capabilities of the device used to consume the content). Providing contextually-relevant content today is no trivial matter. It's challenging, especially for teams that have not adopted advanced information development management practices, e-methods, and tools.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour webinar with structured content expert, Alex Masycheff, co-founder and CEO of Intuillion Ltd. We'll discuss how emerging delivery technologies can leverage structured technical content to deliver contextually relevant content via conversational user interfaces like chatbots. We'll delve into how chatbots can be used to provide improved context-sensitive assistance and we'll demystify the five elements that make chatbots a valuable addition to our customer experience arsenal. Attendees will learn when chatbots bring the greatest value; what makes a chatbot helpful; and, why structured content is critical to chatbot project success.

In 10 years, websites will no longer exist — at least not in the traditional sense. Over the last few years, customer expectations have changed the way we interact in the digital world. Being online no longer means sitting in front of a computer screen.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for this free one-hour webinar with my special guest, Alan J. Porter of OpenText. Alan will talk about the shift that is coming where we no longer will be driving people to our websites. Prospects and customers alike will instead demand that we provide them with the information they need to help them move along their process or digital journey as smoothly and efficiently as possible. We now need to deliver just the right amount of intelligent structured content in context — providing the customer the information they require at the time they need it for the platform/location they are on.

You know all those "rules" you were taught in school about "good writing?" They were lies. Our focus today needs to go beyond grammar and punctuation, and towards clarity and understanding. What works for real people? And what really ARE the rules?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a conversation with rockstar writer, Shelly Davies. You'll learn the difference between grammar rules and grammar conventions; how readers interact with text and receive messages; and how not to sound like a jerk (unless you want to).

About Shelly Davies

Shelly Davies helps businesses save time and money. How? By giving us permission to write like humans. Using research-based approaches to writing better, Shelly builds our confidence and helps us write in ways that make readers want to hug us! (Or not - it really depends if hugs are what we're after. But whatever outcomes we want, Shelly can get us there! She's kinda awesome like that.) Shelly Davies Writing & Training. Because plain English has been cool since way back.

It is intuitive to believe that visuals are more memorable than text. To a certain degree, science confirms this. Research shows that visuals impact recall because they help viewers process information faster and assist them to pay attention by being more engaging than text.

But there is such a thing as a forgettable visual. Think of all the information you encounter in a typical week. How much of it do you remember? We tend to forget our lives almost as quickly as we live them and visuals can still escape our memories.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour educational webinar with cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Carmen Simon, to learn how to stay on people’s minds by applying science-based guidelines from the angle of how the brain processes visuals.

You will learn how to use visual thinking skills in four areas that are prevalent in business communication: facts, processes, data, and abstracts. And, you’ll discover how to use design elements such as images, text, lines, shapes to create interesting—and memorable—content. Dr. Simon will provide you with universal visual design principles and explain how they influence viewer attention and retention.

In just one hour, you will learn how to create and select visuals that impact memory and how to avoid those that don't. Visual thinking is important because when you use images correctly, you have the luxury of staying on your audience’s minds long-term. This helps you influence their decisions because people act in your favor based on what they remember, not on what they forget.

About Dr. Carmen Simon

Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, bestselling author, and leading expert on using memory to influence decision-making. Her most recent book, Impossible to Ignore: Create Memorable Content to Influence Decisions, has won the acclaim of publications such as Inc.com, Forbes, and Fast Company, and has been selected as one of the top international books on persuasion.

The company you work for is trying to give its audience the best product experience in the world. As a technical writer, you want to contribute to that effort by creating awesome user assistance for that product.

There are many great tools out there that can help you to achieve this. These tools include text editors, and graphic and video tools. But how do you decide when to use text, images, or video for your product assistance?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and special guest presenter, Ferry Vermeulen of INSTRKTIV (http://instrktiv.com) for a free, one-hour presentation designed to help guide you make the best choices.

More than 80% of all marketing communications are predicted to be visual by 2018, and social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. That’s a lot of competition for marketers to fight for customer’s attention. How can you make sure you don’t squander precious views once you get them?

Through research, experimentation, and testing, he has learned some of the best ways to create engaging videos and some of the things that make videos less engaging. But it’s not just about making engaging videos. Knowing the best ways to distribute your content plays a big role, too. In this session, Guy will share what he has learned about creating engaging video content, how to add human elements to keep videos feeling genuine, tips on how to get your content to your audience, and how you can avoid viewer drop offs during your videos.

Agile is a rapidly growing method for the development of software. It emphasizes rapid iteration and adaptability. But Agile is no longer just about software—agile is being adopted by organizations in many industries to enable them to be lean and responsive. The traditional content process to create, review, approve, translate, and deliver simply takes too long and is unsustainable.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and my special guests, Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper of The Rockley Group for this free, one-hour webinar. Ann and Charles will discuss how a new agile process is required to develop modular, nimble content, how to significantly shorten the content lifecycle, iteratively translate content, and then publish continuously.

ABOUT ANN ROCKLEY

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group. She has an international reputation for developing multichannel content strategies and digital publishing solutions. She has been instrumental in establishing the field in content strategy, content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multichannel delivery, and content management best practices.

ABOUT CHARLES COOPER

Charles Cooper is VP of The Rockley Group and has over 20 years of experience in quality assurance and over 16 years of experience in eContent, user experience, taxonomy, workflow design, composition, and digital publishing.

As companies grow, so does their content, creating a content conundrum, where there are hundreds or thousands of files but no one can find what they need. The key to overcoming this challenge is to create dynamic systems that deliver personalized content, but that is much easier said than done. CMS tools like MadCap Flare drive efficiency and reuse for professional writers, but about a third of the content in a typical ecosystem is created by “Subject Matter Expert" writers using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and even the writing groups don’t always have the time they need to be really innovative with their tools.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guests, Lynn Carrier and Kathleen Pierce, for this free, one-hour webinar. Kathleen and Lynn came at this content problem from complementary angles—improving the content-creation and the content-delivery engines for customers and the field.

You’ll come away from this talk with practical ideas for taking a smart approach to personalization; getting SME authors on board with best practices; using low-end tools to show the possibilities and make the case for further investment; and taking advantage of the right tools to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time, every time.

After over 15 years working on multichannel-friendly, personalization-friendly, and future-friendly content, Noz Urbina has latched firmly on to customer journey maps (CJMs) as today’s most vital content technique.

A customer journey map goes beyond static personas and helps diverse content stakeholders to design content plans and models that deliver the right type and level of content to the right user when and where they need it. CJMs bring together large amounts of user information and map it out to support improved content structures, content types, and editorial plans that work across channels and siloed touchpoints.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Noz Urbina, global content strategist, for this free, one-hour webinar. Attendees will learn how to more effectively communicate with agencies, partners, subject matter experts, and other content creators; how to collaborate across teams on personalization-ready content; how to build future-friendly content models and content plans; and how to get more leverage out of your content assets over time and across devices.

ABOUT NOZ URBINA

Noz Urbina is a globally recognized leader in the field of content strategy and a customer experience consultant who can effectively bridge organizational and user goals. Noz is well-known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modeling for delivering personalized, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. He is a co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” with Rahel Anne Bailie, and a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences. Noz has coached teams, developed processes, and spearheaded solutions that have helped some of the world’s largest organizations leverage their content assets to stand out in their sectors while avoiding headcount increases and wasted costs.

Silos and collaboration are usually posed as contrasts against each other. But in reality, they don’t have to be. Do you know how you can harness the power of silos to create efficient collaboration? It begins with addressing the silo "frame of mind."

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Christian Gericke, Chief Marketing Officer at smashDOCs as he reveals the key methods of helping companies in every industry become more effective in their cross-team creation process.

You will not only learn the cautionary tales about silos but also how they are essential to a company’s health and how to "use tech" rather than simply "have tech." Collaboration occurs when embracing the challenges of silos and moving with their power, rather than fighting against them.

Takeaways:

—Silos may be dangerous, but they are also essential, and when their power is harnessed, it leads to collaboration and accountability
—It's a mistake to assume "having" tech is the same as it using tech effectively
—Speedy collaboration is a competitive edge in achieving long-term business success

ABOUT CHRISTIAN GERICKE

Christian Gericke is the CMO for smashDOCs and a volunteer for Translators without Borders who manages this challenge both online and offline. Christian spent the last 25 years in various management positions in the document and information management industry for companies such as Acrolinx, HP, and Exstream Software.

Knowing what needs to be done and achieving it are dramatically different things. While there’s consensus that carefully and deliberately establishing and articulating a content strategy for a product, an organization, or an enterprise is a good thing, execution remains an elusive holy grail.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Toni Mantych for this free, one-hour webinar. In this session, we’ll take a look at real challenges—logistic, political, and technical—faced as one Fortune 300 company undertook to develop a “unified content strategy” across functional groups (documentation, training, knowledge management) and divergent content.

We will discuss techniques and strategies such as emphasizing common goal of client/user satisfaction to unite groups with different historical foci; employing data-driven decision-making to ensure good decisions but also to relieve organizational bias, and using charters and other project management tools to identify, celebrate, and effectively make use of the unique skills, perspectives, and assets of each participating group.

ABOUT TONI MANTYCH

Toni Mantych solves client problems with content, and content problems with technology. She is currently Director, Technical Project and Portfolio Management at ADP. In that role, she oversees content strategy and architecture projects and leads the Information Architecture and Content Strategy team for the Information Development Services group (IDS). Over the last five years, Toni has spearheaded the adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and component content management within IDS and ADP.

Would you like to know how to break down content silos, why content that is cross-functional benefits end-users, and when to produce content by segment?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Ena Gordon, Vice President for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management for this free, one-hour webinar. Ena's presentation will demystify the steps needed to move a large organization away from traditional siloed content production approaches and toward a unified content strategy. She will examine how Morgan Stanley adopted a unified content strategy and she will share best practices and lessons learned along the way.

ABOUT ENA GORDON

Ena Gordon is content strategist that specializes in transforming content strategies built for paper into dynamic webified experiences.

Every interaction with prospects and customers is an opportunity to delight and inform. Content plays one of the biggest roles in creating outstanding customer experiences. Connecting customer and content can be a challenge. All organizations, whether B2C or B2B, should develop customer journeys with the intent of building a relationship with the customer. Doing so will allow you to leverage these journeys within your content planning and creation processes.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my guests, Adam Helweh and Kevin P. Nichols for this free, one-hour webinar designed to describe and define the modern customer journey and explore the role content plays in fueling how prospects and customers interact with your brand at each stage.

Attendees will learn what a modern customer journey actually looks like; why relying on a linear or funnel approach isn't as helpful as you might think and what is the impact of providing the right content at the right time to prospects and customers alike. In addition, Adam and Kevin will talk about the role content plays in shaping customer experience, how to use a customer journey map for effective content planning and creation, and what you need to create a customer-journey content map.

ABOUT ADAM HELWEH

Adam Helweh is the CEO and founder of Secret Sushi Creative. He specializes in and is deeply passionate about, the convergence of design, social and technology to provide businesses with more intelligent and human ways to connect with customers to grow sales.

ABOUT KEVIN P. NICHOLS

Kevin P. Nichols is an award-winning thought leader, digital industry enthusiast, and author with more than twenty-two years of professional experience. As a team leader at SapientNitro Kevin grew of one of the oldest global content strategy teams into one of the largest and most successful in the world. Currently, Kevin is Executive Director of Experience at AvenueCX, a consultancy specializing in enterprise content strategy.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a panel discussion designed to help you identify—and overcome—typical challenges associated with product content delivery. I'll chat with Noel McDonagh (Dell EMC), Lawrence Orin (Riverbed), and Joe Gelb (Zoomin Software) about the lessons they have learned that you can use to develop a streamlined content delivery process that takes advantage of modern content creation and management practices, standards, tools and technologies.

Attendees will learn:

*the practical challenges of moving to a delivery platform
*the main drivers for adoption of dynamic content delivery (and the problems
associated with implementing it)
*strategies for getting management buy-in
*tips on building an implementation team
*metrics you collect
*potential organizational pitfalls and risks

The Holy Trifecta of Content is the intersection of managed terminology, structured authoring, and translation memory. If you have these three components of content under control, your content will be easier to read in every language, easier to translate, easier to locate, and easier to create.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for this presentation with Val Swisher, CEO of Content Rules. Val will focus on the Holy Trifecta of Global Content Success, how the components work together, and why they are critical factors for successful global content. You’ll leave with an understanding of how terminology, structure, and translation memory work and how paying attention to all three factors will help your customers provide better content in any language.

ABOUT VAL SWISHER

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, an end-to-end content services provider who helps customers plan and execute their global content strategy, create content in structured and non-structured environments, and prepare content for translation.

Val is a global content strategy thought leader and an expert in making source English content global-ready. In addition to running Content Rules, Val is on the Executive Board for Translators without Borders, where she is responsible for creating and running the Simplified English program. Translators without Borders works with non-governmental organizations to provide critical, life-saving translations for humanitarian causes around the globe.

Val is also the co-producer of Information Development World and a featured presenter at many online and in-person events. Val’s third book, “Global Content Strategy: A Primer,” was published by XML Press in 2014.

Managing global content across your organization and across multiple languages, locales, and platforms can get complex. In this session, we’ll discuss five steps you can take to simplify and automate this process while increasing speed-to-market and international brand exposure. With global expansion comes complexity in managing multilingual, digital content across locales. This session provides insights into what solutions can be put in place to ease that complexity, across the organization, while setting up for brand success across cultures

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Matt Grotenstein, VP of Client Development at Acclaro, for this presentation. Matt will show you how to prioritize content for localization, how to implement automated workflows for faster time-to-market, successfully speak in your brand's voice across cultures, and how to measure impact across the organization.

ABOUT MATT GROTENSTEIN

Matt Grotenstein, Acclaro’s VP of Client Development, has co-founded several industry-leading software and finance companies. He currently leads a team of seasoned sales professionals to understand client challenges and provide smart solutions, drawing insight from an extensive background in international communication. Being an expert in global business communication, translation technology, and software localization, he sits on the Board of the translation industry non-profit Red-T, while offering guest lectures at the Baruch College School of Communication.

After the golden years of growth during the 1990s and early 2000s, we’re witnessing global disintegration with a loss of confidence in globalization and free trade. In an era when the idea of globalization seems in decline and replaced by fear and protectionism can we redefine and rebuild globalization into a strategy for success?

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, global content strategy consultant, Diana Ballard, for a free one-hour discussion about the future of globalization. Ballard will examine how some countries and companies are bucking the trend and profiting from globalization today.

Attendees will learn how:

* multiculturalism builds stronger communities, solutions, and outlooks
* to embrace diversity—exchanging rather than excluding ideas—in order to drive disruptive innovation
* digital transformation and technology is set to defeat the fear of globalization

This session is intended as a discussion to re-construct our idea of globalization creating renewed optimism and a strategy for success.

About Diana Ballard

Diana Ballard has a 30-year track record in international business operating across diverse and challenging environments from manufacturing, to service, and to consultancy. She has the expertise, insight, and commitment to creating value through long-trusted business relationships, placing the customer at the heart of every transaction. Her entrepreneurial spirit drives her to lead and explore every challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow. Diana is aspiring to create digital continuity by unifying information across the enterprise, and by bringing everyone into the same conversation, the one which speaks to customers in their language.

The Content Wrangler Channel covers the people, methods, tools and technologies designed to help you deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right device, in the right format and language. Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.